- I've never taken any illegal drugs. While most people would take this as a point of pride (especially while responding to their parents), I actually feel obscurely guilty about it - as if there's an entire avenue of human experience I've been cut off from. I don't have any plans to partake of the wacky weed any time soon, though, since I feel like it's hard enough for me to maintain a "normal" mental state with the assistance of caffeine.
- I have read and listened to dozens of books and lectures by Christian apologists, most notably Ravi Zacharias and Lee Strobel in an attempt to better understand and have dialog with my Christian friends. Unfortunately this attempt has been an almost complete failure. I still don't even understand most of the arguments being made, let alone found them convincing, but I now have an encyclopedic knowledge of the various shibboleths that Christians use when discussing both their own faith and the "liberal secular humanist" threat that I represent.
- In high school, I was an illegal "ringer" for Math League. Despite poor performance in class, I had done lots of computer-art projects on my own which had resulted in an extremely good understanding of geometry. I hadn't paid dues for Math League and therefore not technically allowed to participate, but the teacher in charge was highly competitive and plied me with free food to get me to fill a gap in the team at a few competitions. I'm still not really sure why this was, since as far as I could tell I wasn't really improving the team's performance. My guess is that geometry was a badly neglected subject in the school's curriculum.
- When I lived in Austin, I participated semi-regularly in a Vampire: the Masquerade live-action role-playing game. I didn't have any "LARP" experience at the time, so the game master's advice was to "play what you know". Naturally my vampire character's particular curse gave him something that I am very familiar with: a fear of blood. It made his life pretty hard.
- When I was at Ninjaneering, our first project was a game called
"Exodus", a 4X galactic
conquest game with some very interesting resource-management. Much
of the gameplay was actually a sort of glorified stoichiometry since
players had to keep the "pipe full" at each facility which took in
resources and emitted products. It saddens me that almost nobody
knows this about me, because the game was quite cool and it is unfortunate
that it died on the vine.
Almost a month ago, I was tagged by my
father in the "five things" game which threatens to destroy everyone's
privacy forever. This can be a tricky proposition even in when one is
tagged by a stranger, but to be tagged by a member of one's own family makes
it almost impossible. I hope that these are all news to him, but this
is the best I can do. They'll certainly be news to
somebody...